The conservative acting and left -wing lawyer of Ecuador forward to the presidential basin – public radio in South Carolina

Guayaquil, Ecuador – Ecuador will select his next run -off president after conservative acting Daniel Noboa and left -wing lawyer Louisa Gonzalez won enough votes on Sunday to beat 14 other candidates.

The competition, set for April 13, will be a repetition of the SNAP election October 2023, which won the Noboa 16-month-old Presidency.

Noboa and Gonzalez are now fighting for a full four -year term, promising voters to reduce the widespread criminal activity that increased their lives four years ago.

The spike in violence in the country of South America is bound by cocaine trafficking produced in neighboring Colombia and Peru. So many voters have fallen victim to crimes that their personal and collective losses are a determining factor in deciding whether a third president for four years can turn Ecuador around or whether Noboa deserves more time in service.

Noboa, a heir to a wealth built on banana trade, and Gonzalez, the protégé of Ecuador’s most influential president this century, were the clear front athletes before the election.

The numbers published by the Ecuador National Election Board show that with 80%of the ballots, Noboa received over 3.71 million votes, or 44.43%, while Gonzalez won over 3.69 million votes, or 44.17%. The 14 other candidates in the competition were far behind them.

Voting is a must in Ecuador. Election authorities report that more than 83% of approximately 13.7 million voters are eligible to choose ballots.

A crime, bands and the blackmail of Noboa’s clock, the killing rate dropped from 46.18 per 100,000 people in 2023 to 38.76 per 100,000 people last year. Still, she was far higher than 6.85 per 100,000 people in 2019, and other crimes, such as abduction and blackmail, have jumped, making people afraid to leave their homes.

“For me, this president is catastrophic,” said 35 -year -old Martha Barez, who went to the voting center with her three teenage children. “Can you change things after four years? No. He did nothing.”

Barz, who has to pay $ 25 a month to a local band, to avoid harassment or worse, said he supports Gonzalez because he believes he can reduce crime throughout the board and improve the economy.

Noboa defeated Gonzalez in October 2023 at Snap elections, which were triggered by the then President Guillermo Laso’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly and shorten his own term as a result. Noboa and Gonzalez, a mentor to former President Rafael Corea, had only brief stays as legislators before launching their presidential campaigns in the same year.

In order to win straight Sunday, a candidate needed 50% of the vote, or at least 40% with a 10-point lead above the nearest Challenger.

More than 100,000 police officers and military members were located across the country to protect the elections, including in the voting centers. At least 50 officers accompanied Noboa, his wife and their 2-year-old son to a voting center, where the president threw his ballot in the small community of the Pacific coast of Olon.

Testing the limits of the laws and rules of the 37 -year -old management, he opened a company to organize an event when he was 18 and then joined Noboa Corp. to his father, where he held managerial positions in shipping, logistics and commercial areas. His political career began in 2021, when he won a place in the National Assembly and chaired his Committee on Economic Development.

As a president, for the last 15 months, some of his mano Dura or heavy hands, tactics to reduce crime have been under control inside and outside the country to test the boundaries of laws and norms of government.

His tactics in question include the state of the internal armed conflict, which he declared in January 2024 to mobilize the military in places where organized crime had taken up, as well as last year’s approval of a police raid at the Embassy of Mexico in the capital, Kito, yes He arrested former Vice President Jorge Glass, a convicted criminal and fugitive who had lived there for months.

However, his main approach also won him votes.

“Noboa is the only person who hits the hard-organized crime,” said retired German Rico, who voted to re-elect the president, told a senior sector in a senior class with closed communities separated from the port city of Guayakil from the river.

“Things will not change, the 47-year-old, occupying different public jobs during the Korean Presidency, who runs Ecuador from 2007 to 2017 with social conservative free spending policies and has become more and more authoritative in recent years as President. He was sentenced to prison in absentia in 2020 in a corruption scandal.

Gonzalez was a deputy from 2021 to May 2023, when Lasso dissolved the National Assembly. She was not known to most voters until Korea’s party chose her as her presidential candidate for Snap elections.

The University of American Professor Maria Christina Bayas said the result of Sunday was a “triumph” for the Correa Party, as the election polls projected a wider difference between Noboa and González.

Esteban Ron, Dean of the Faculty of Social and Legal Sciences at SEK International University in Kito, said Noboa would be forced to reegence his campaign at the risk that he may have already reached the ceiling of his voice. Ron attributes the result of the problems that Noboa faced during his administration.

In anticipation of her turn to vote in Guayakil, architecture student Keila Torres said she had not yet decided to vote for. No one, she said, would be able to reduce crime through Ecuador because of a deep -rooted corruption of the government.

“If I could, I wouldn’t be here,” said Torres, who has witnessed three robberies in public buses in the last four years and barely escaped from the steal in December. “Things won’t change.”

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